The car and the highway also led to the suburb, which is anathema to the neocommunists. They want people in cities, in small apartments and homes, preferably renting and not owning. Makes people that much more dependent on government and less free.
Great post. Many thanks for the info
An excellent and generally ignored point. Even in areas with extensive public transport options, their capacity is very small compared to what would be required if a significant move away from cars took place.
In a back office of Portland City Hall almost 40 years ago, a young aide to then Portland City Commissioner Neil Goldschmidt took pen to pad and wrote "Disincentives to the Automobile." This left-wing blueprint of environmental social engineering became the bible of Portland's urban utopian planning. Eventually, when Goldschmidt became the U.S. Secretary of Transportation in the Carter Administration, the dogma of "disincentives" went global. The aim of "Disincentives to the Automobile" was to make the driving of cars so cost-prohibitive, so miserable and so inconvenient that the populace would minimize or stop driving altogether... Even though the liberals have been inordinately successful in making driving cost-prohibitive and miserable, the public has not rushed in adequate numbers to their transportation alternatives. Even if we had, their exorbitant commuting options could barely handle 10 percent of us... The same folks, who have furiously fought to prevent increasing domestic oil drilling and processing, pompously scream the loudest about America's reliance on foreign oil... The biggest irony of all is that their conspiracy to get us out of our cars has done little for either our livability or our environment.